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March 23, 2017

Things were different back then. For example, PCs came with floppy drives, no optical disks, and no built-in networking. Wi-Fi didn’t exist. USB? Forget it. If you wanted on the Internet, you purchased a dialup modem. And storage was measured in kilobytes and megabytes. It was a different world.
I typically retire a computer after four to six years of service, sometimes longer. I keep old systems around for a while, but eventually I yank out the hard drive and recycle the hardware. I broke that rule with one PC, however: Koby, a 1994 vintage IBM PC that I’ve kept “just in case.”

Koby is also one of the few PCs I have that features a 5¼-inch floppy drive. For my recent experiments in The Quest For Floppy (Post1, Post2), I pulled out Koby’s 5¼-inch drive. Before I did so, I powered-on the system to see whether or not it still worked.

It lives!

The old PC came up just fine, though it’s not perfect. The CMOS battery is dead, plus it has other issues. I was able to get Windows 3.11 to run and started Word version 6.0. The system crashed a few times, but I was so thrilled that I made a video documenting the process. Until the male-to-male PATA converter arrives, this will have to do for your Quest For Floppy update.

2 Comments

I tend to keep old functional PC’s in a bone yard, I find them useful for bits & old software to open things at times. I was very grateful that I did this when I tried to open a CD-R that hadn’t been closed properly using Adaptec software that couldn’t be read by Win 10, I was able to fire up the old PC spend ten minutes working out how to use the acient software then get what I wanted.

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